I grew up in orphanages in Russia and Poland. I do not remember my father at all, and I only remember my mother’s death. When I was three years old, my family was sent to a labor camp in Komi, Northern Russia, after we fled from our hometown Wyszkow, Poland, which had been bombed. I remember that my mother was not with us for some time; she was sick in the hospital. When she came back, she acted very strange; for instance, she once tried to put my brother’s red boots on my feet. I was angry with her about that. I remember her...

When my mother died in 1942, my 14-year old uncle took charge of us. My uncle went to the commandant of the labor camp and asked for advice on what to do with two orphaned small children. After a phone call the commandant told my uncle that he found a place for us in an orphanage. It was a harsh wintertime, and what I remember specifically was that we had no shoes at all. I remember the long journey by a horse-driven sleigh. I also remember that a woman came and took my brother on a small sleigh, and that was the last time I ever saw my...

I am Felicia Wertz, Izaak’s niece, residing in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Although I am not physically present at this memorial service, I feel your pain of loss. Izaak was my closest uncle, my mother’s brother, who lived with us in Wyszkow, Poland. When the Second World War broke out, I was only two years old, and my brother Gena, who is not with us anymore, was only a year old. Our native town, Wyszkow, was bombed out, and we were forced to escape to Russia. My parents and Izaak were sent to a forced labor camp. My parents died,...

Felicia Stolarczyk Wertz, Biography

Felicia Stolarczyk Wertz: “I was born in Wyszkow, a small town near Warsaw, Poland. When WWII started on September 1, 1939, and our town was bombed out and Jewish people killed, we managed to escape to the Polish eastern border. By September 15, 1939, the area we escaped to was occupied by the Soviets, who let us in and then sent us to their northern uninhabited area (Komi Autonomous Republic) to a hard labor camp. It was there that my mother died of typhoid, my father perished, and my fourteen-year-old uncle was in charge of two little children, my brother, 3, and me, then Faiga Smolarczyk, 4. I was moved from orphanage to orphanage until the whole orphanage was moved to Poland after the war, where, in 1948, I ended up in a Jewish-run orphanage in Lodz. Later, I studied history in Russia at Leningrad University (I graduated in 1960), and I also hold an M.A degree in English from Warsaw University. I came to the U.S.A. in 1966 and taught Russian and Polish in several colleges. I have two daughters: Anna Wertz--who graduated from Washington University and earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley--and my younger daughter ,Melanie Wertz, who earned her B.A from Swarthmore College and an M.A in mathematics from Columbia University in New York. I am retired and devote my time to the Russian Oral History Project (at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center), under the guidance of Sister Prince.”